Nick Leeson collapsed the Barings Bank by losing £827 million. He lost his job, went to prison for four years in Singapore and won't be managing other people's money any time soon.
By contrast, Gordon Brown has lost over twice as much, £2 billion and he's going to be promoted to Prime Minister. Given more authority. The difference is that Leeson only had an old and important bank's capital to lose. He didn't have recourse to extorting ever money from the taxpayer to cover his losses.
Brown has destroyed one of the world's best funded pension systems and lost £2 billion going against advice from the Bank of England. He should be under pressure to resign. Why on Earth is he still entrusted with taxpayers' money? How is he still the favourite to be the next Prime Minister?
6 comments:
That's provocative. I like it. How about Beckett? - Two thirds of a Leeson.
Just a side point but Nick Leeson does manage other people's money- he is a director might be chairman even of Galway football club in Ireland- and according to this they aren't doing too badly either!!!!!
Not sure what that says about Brown though?
I don't know may be 40 quarters of consecutive growth...
Okay, BoE independence rocks.
However, as for those 40 quarters of growth. What exactly did he do to create this economic performance?
Gracchi's right but the point stands - Brown is doing the same thing and has the BB's behind him and the SR. Leeson has lost his.
A Chancellor, if he wants to raise taxation, has to increase taxes somewhere. I don't see why doing it by getting rid of a tax exemption for dividends paid to pension funds is particularly outrageous. After all, the previous system was based on unfairly favourable treatment of pension funds (as compared to other investors).
I wrote about this on my blog a while ago - http://vinospoliticalblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/larry-elliott-on-dividend-taxation-fuss.html
Post a Comment